By Raphaëlle Béhar
Edited by Olivia Wigod and Louane Biquin
“I Love Dick” might sound like a joke—and that’s the point. Chris Kraus titles her novel with a declaration that is at once shamelessly personal and strategically performative, challenging readers to consider how seriously a woman’s voice is taken when she dares to speak about herself. This provocation cuts directly against what Philippe Lejeune terms the “autobiographical pact,” the assumption that author, narrator, and protagonist align, and that such alignment guarantees truth and sincerity (Anderson 3). Yet this model is far from neutral; it is deeply gendered. Rooted in Enlightenment ideals of rational, autonomous manhood, the autobiographical genre has historically excluded women, conferring legitimacy and authority unevenly along gendered lines. Consequently, women writing the self have long been dismissed as confessional, excessive, or emotionally indulgent, their voices constantly in need of justification.
How, then, can women write themselves into genres built to discipline and exclude them? This question is literary as well as institutional: it speaks to the broader conditions under which women’s knowledge, testimony, and authorship are recognised or refused within academic and cultural systems. Gertrude Stein and Chris Kraus respond to this exclusion by sabotaging the genre from within instead of seeking entry on autobiography’s existing terms. Read together, Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and Kraus’ I Love Dick (1997) form a feminist continuum where authorship emerges not through stable self-assertion, but through rupture, mediation, and performative excess.
Stein’s early-modernist refusal of autobiographical transparency anticipates Kraus’ late-twentieth-century autotheoretical rebellion, revealing a shared feminist imperative: when women write the self, they must first dismantle the structures that deny them authority. While Stein writes her life through the voice of her partner, Alice B. Toklas, recounting her life among the Parisian avant-garde and her experience of World War I, Kraus’ I Love Dick unfolds through a series of obsessive unreciprocated love letters. Addressed to a largely silent man named “Dick,” the letters gradually mutate into diary entries, cultural criticism, and theoretical reflection. Autotheory—the fusion of personal experience and critical thought (Fournier, Autotheory as Feminist Practice 7)—emerges in Kraus’ work as a feminist practice rather than a confessional mode, allowing her to claim intellectual and emotional space simultaneously. In their formally experimental autobiographies, Stein and Kraus parody genre conventions and deploy vicarious narration, name-naming, and gendered tropes to challenge the patriarchal logic of authorship and reimagine the female “I” as plural, relational, and generative.
Gertrude Stein and Chris Kraus both use what critics call vicarious writing to subvert the first tenet of the autobiographical pact: the expectation that author, narrator, and protagonist align. Rather than speaking directly as themselves, both authors write through another figure: Stein through her partner Toklas, and Kraus through her addressee, Dick. As Carsten Junker explains, vicarious writing occurs when authors are either “authorized” or “authorize themselves” to speak through or about another person (326). In Stein’s and Kraus’ hands, this strategy allows women writers to distance themselves from the demand for autobiographical sincerity while still claiming narrative authority.
Stein’s use of vicarious writing is at once simple and radical. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas announces itself, in its very title, as the life story of Stein’s partner, inviting readers to expect a conventional memoir written by Toklas about Stein. In the early twentieth century, such domestic memoirs—life narratives of women that ultimately served to chronicle the lives of “great men”—were a popular and socially acceptable genre, and one of the few forms of life-writing available to women (Doyle 53). What makes Stein’s use of this form especially striking is that the “genius” at its center is not a man, but a woman, and that the voice narrating this apparent tribute ultimately belongs to Stein herself. By adopting the conventions of a genre built to elevate male artistic authority, Stein initially appears to reproduce a familiar literary arrangement: the devoted female companion narrating the genius of her partner. She sustains this illusion for nearly the entire book, only to overturn it in the final paragraph, when she abruptly reveals that she has authored the text herself:
About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it. (269)
This late disclosure retroactively unsettles everything that precedes it. Stein exposes Toklas’ seemingly sincere, admiring account as her own carefully staged performance of domestic memoir. Throughout the text, free indirect discourse blurs the voices of Stein and Toklas, creating a shared authorial presence that makes it difficult to locate a single, stable “I.” Toklas, who also types Stein’s manuscripts in real life, thus emerges not merely as a character, but as a collaborator and co-producer of Stein’s authorship.
Crucially, Stein’s admission arrives only once the narrative is complete, staging a collapse of the reader’s belief in autobiographical sincerity after the fact. By withholding her claim to authorship until the end, Stein exposes sincerity as a structural effect produced by genre conventions rather than a moral quality of truth-telling. The text felt truthful because it convincingly performed the familiar codes of feminine domestic memoir. The reveal thus weaponizes hindsight, demonstrating that autobiography’s guarantees of authenticity are always belated, repeatedly constructed, and never secure. In replacing a unified autobiographical “I” with a shared, mediated voice, Stein establishes a vicarious pact: a strategy that allows her to claim space as a woman writer within a literary culture structured by male authority, while simultaneously disrupting the coherence and transparency that autobiography traditionally demands.
Kraus stages a similar disruption through the structure of I Love Dick, but with a key difference: her vicarious writing is not authorized. From the opening letters, she addresses Dick obsessively, writing him into being as both subject and object. “It is impossible to write alone,” she claims, situating feminine writing as inherently relational and dialogic, in contrast to the myth of solitary male authorship (97). Early on, Dick serves as a stand-in for masculine theory culture, allowing Kraus to write within the traditions that exclude her. But as the novel progresses, especially in the second half, she shifts toward an intertextual feminist conversation involving women performance artists and theorists (Fournier, “Performing Phallic Mimesis as Parody” 40), ultimately reclaiming the “I” for herself.
Kraus stages this transformation through her understanding of female subjectivity as “schizophrenia,” which she analyses as a trope in twentieth-century theory. Drawing on the feminist theorist Luce Irigaray, Kraus writes: “‘The divided self’ is female subjectivity,” and “there is no female ‘I’ in existing (patriarchal) language” (241). The “I” in literature and theory is implicitly male: rational, bounded, coherent. To work within the world of patriarchal language, the only possibility is schizophrenia, to embrace the breakdown of the “I”—emotionally, linguistically, and narratively—not as failure, but as the only available strategy for writing female subjectivity into being. Kraus acknowledges in a letter to Dick that she writes through him to “create a certain schizophrenic atmosphere” (221). Her letters to Dick blur the boundary between speaker and addressee, but they also implicate the reader, drawing them into what she calls a schizophrenic “transfer of energy” (241). This “transfer” crucially implies circulation: desire and authority move across positions and do not originate in a sovereign “I.” The letter form already destabilizes authorship; the “I” exists only in relation to a “you.” Yet in publishing the letters, Kraus multiplies that “you”: Dick becomes both private addressee and public fiction, while the reader occupies the structural position of the one addressed. In doing so, Kraus therefore displaces the energy of confession.
Schizophrenia thus becomes less a fragmentation of self than a refusal of containment. The subject is produced in motion, through address and circulation. The reader cannot remain a detached observer; to read the letter is to receive it, and to receive it is to enter the economy of desire it stages. The “transfer of energy” names this destabilization of narrative authority: the collapse of a bounded speaker into a field of relational intensities. The vicarious address becomes a performative breakdown, of mode and address, through which Kraus constructs herself as both theorist and subject.
Yet Kraus’ embrace of “schizophrenia” as a feminist tactic risks romanticizing psychic fragmentation and reinscribing the long-standing alignment of female subjectivity with pathology. Critic Susan Bordo cautions against feminist readings that privilege the symbolic force of female disorder while neglecting its practical effects (180–181). To celebrate hysteria as protest, she argues, is to overlook how such symptoms often function “in collusion” (177) with the very structures they seem to resist, reproducing rather than dismantling the norms of femininity. The danger is not simply that breakdown is pathologized, but that its spectacle can eclipse any material transformation. Kraus’ project is powerful precisely because it walks this knife-edge: she invokes schizophrenia not to aestheticize distress but to expose the violence of a literary order in which female coherence is impossible.
Linda Anderson, drawing on poststructuralist theorists like Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, emphasizes that autobiography no longer presumes a stable, pre-existing self. Rather, the self in autobiography is always produced through writing; the self is a rhetorical and performative effect (11–12). Kraus embraces this instability by beginning her novel through another (Dick), and Stein anticipates it by writing through Toklas. Both texts collapse the binary of subject and object, refusing traditional narrative authority in favor of a fragmented, relational self. Yet their approaches differ. In Stein’s novel, the vicarious pact is authorized, born of personal and artistic collaboration. In Kraus’, it is transgressive and asymmetrical: she writes without consent, using Dick as a placeholder for her own emergence. Stein displaces authorship only to reclaim it as collaborative and female, while Kraus centers Dick to erase him, carving space for a female “I” that emerges from within the very structures that exclude it. Both authors destabilize authorship in order to rewrite it, exposing how female subjectivity must be invented through acts of writing.
To break the second tenet of the autobiographical pact—that the reader expects truth and sincerity—Stein and Kraus deploy genre-blurring strategies. Autobiographical authority is not granted equally: while male writers are often read as universal and serious, women must “prove” their sincerity—often through emotion, shame, or apology—to be taken seriously (Anderson 25). The female “I” is thus always under suspicion. This suspicion extends beyond literature, shaping how women’s knowledge, testimony, and authority are evaluated in academic, cultural, and political spaces more broadly. Stein and Kraus respond to this double bind in opposite but equally subversive ways: Kraus performs sincerity through confessional form, while Stein refuses it by parodying the domestic memoir.
Kraus explicitly draws on feminized genres, the bourgeois epistolary novel and the diary, to displace patriarchal literary norms. Her letters contain intimate, even abject disclosures: her sex life with Sylvère, her Crohn’s disease, her emotional breakdowns. These overshares function less as confession than as strategic performances of honesty, echoing Luce Irigaray’s idea that the “disruptive excess” of feminine expression resists phallocentric logic (Lake 520). As Dick remains silent, Kraus uses his absence as a blank surface on which to write herself into being (Lake 523). The one-sided correspondence frees her from the need to moderate her voice; the more he withdraws, the more unfiltered she becomes. This dynamic transforms the epistolary form into something more diaristic. As the salutation shifts from “Dear Dick” to “DD” and an implied “Dear Diary,” Dick becomes not a recipient but a tool, a stand-in for the reader, for patriarchy, for the phallus itself. As Lake notes, this reversal “flips relationality”: Kraus writes the other to construct the self. The title itself encodes this reversal as “I Love Dick” places the female subject “I” first, subordinating Dick as object and symbol.
Stein’s approach is more oblique, but just as radical. She adopts the form of the domestic memoir only to reverse it (Doyle 53). By ventriloquizing Alice’s voice, Stein installs herself as the genius and Alice as the devoted witness. This inversion parodies the genre’s conventions while using them as camouflage. Stein exploits the memoir’s familiarity and modest tone to smuggle in radical ideas about art, authorship, and gender under the guise of domesticity. The novel’s final reveal—that it was Stein, not Toklas, who wrote the autobiography—overtly undermines the expectation of sincerity. But Stein also challenges sincerity through strategic omissions: she never explicitly addresses her queerness or Jewishness, both central to her life. This silence enacts a refusal to perform identity in expected, acceptable ways. By playing with the feminine voice, Stein offers a form of life-writing that is ironic, elusive, and performative, rather than candid. Where Kraus uses genre to expose herself, Stein turns to it as a way of masking and multiplying the self. Yet both disrupt the reader’s expectation of a coherent, truthful “I.” In doing so, they reject the gendered rules of autobiographical sincerity and claim authorship on their own, fractured terms.
In their deconstruction of male-dominated artistic and intellectual spheres, both Stein and Kraus employ gossip and name-dropping—modes of communication historically coded as “low” culture and associated with feminine or “trivial” writing. Rather than distancing themselves from these forms, both authors lean into them as strategies of infiltration and critique: Stein disrupts the mythos of Parisian modernist male genius, while Kraus challenges the authority of academic theory and male-dominated autobiographical tradition. What critics dismiss as gossip or name-dropping functions here as a form of genre contamination: a rhetorical irritant that corrupts the masculine ideal of the pure, self-contained autobiographical subject. By importing feminized speech into a genre built upon rational self-unity, Stein and Kraus force autobiography to acknowledge the social, relational, and embodied contexts it pretends to transcend.
Kraus explicitly thematizes the gendered politics of conversation in a scene with her friend Laura: “But since this’s school, not girltalk, we both work hard to keep our conversations on a referential but ever so suggestive plane. Meeting Laura’s always like inhaling ether; like ladies in the Heian Court, we’re always conscious of ‘the form.’” (135). Here, Kraus highlights the internalized hierarchy between “theoretical” and “feminine” discourse. Even in private, women feel pressured to perform intellectual seriousness, suppressing emotional or unstructured speech in favor of “the form.” This self-policing reveals how deeply gendered norms shape public writing as well as interpersonal speech. It is also why, throughout the novel, Kraus’ voice emerges most forcefully in Dick’s silence, which creates a space where she can write unfiltered. References to artists, theorists, and friends in Kraus’ work function as forms of name-dropping that collapse boundaries between memoir, criticism, and cultural history (Fournier, Autotheory as Feminist Practice 193). These names construct scenes and intellectual communities while also subverting hierarchies: the personal becomes theoretical, and theory becomes personal. By naming real-life figures from the art world, Kraus inserts herself into the very circles that exclude her. Name-dropping becomes a kind of feminist tactic, a way of claiming space in conversations that otherwise refuse her entry.
Stein, too, mobilizes gossip as a literary tactic, though with a cooler, more ironic inflection. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she renders the romantic and domestic lives of celebrated male artists in a deliberately gossipy, comedic register. For instance, Stein first introduces Picasso not through his paintings but through Toklas’ encounter with his partner Fernande:
She leaned over us and said solemnly, do you want to take french lessons. We hesitated, why yes we could take french lessons. Well Fernande will give you french lessons, go and find her and tell her how absolutely you are pining to take french lessons. But why should she give us french lessons, we asked. Because, well because she and Pablo have decided to separate forever. I suppose it has happened before but not since I have known them. (22)
The repetition of “french lessons” paired with the looping phrasing undercut the seriousness of the moment, presenting Picasso as a man entangled in domestic drama rather than a towering genius. Later, Stein lists the wives of male geniuses in a parodic roll call: “Fernande… Madame Matisse… Marcelle Braque… Josette Gris…” (94). This chorus of “wives” humorously exposes the gendered structure of the art world and Stein’s own position within it, destabilizing the categories of “genius” and “wife of genius.” By presenting these women in a rhythmic sequence, Stein turns the mythology of male genius into something faintly absurd, sustained less by originality than by domestic scaffolding.
Stein and Kraus use gossip and name-dropping to perform complex social and literary work. These references both build and critique communities: they democratize access to intellectual spaces by demystifying them yet also reveal the insider/outsider dynamics of literary and artistic circles. Stein elevates herself through her proximity to genius but undermines that genius through tone and content. Kraus inserts herself into theory while simultaneously referencing its gatekeepers. In both cases, gossip and name-dropping function not as distractions from “serious” autobiographical writing but as central literary devices that challenge what seriousness means, and who gets to claim it.
As performative acts, these gestures of gossip and citation also stage gender itself. Both Stein and Kraus exaggerate and parody gendered roles to interrogate the cultural construction of authorship, artistic legitimacy, and genius. Rather than rejecting femininity outright, they exaggerate, invert, and inhabit gendered tropes to expose them as theatrical rather than innate. This strategy aligns with Judith Butler’s formulation of gender as something one does rather than something one is: a performance produced through discourse, not an expression of stable identity (Doyle 46). In this sense, texts do not simply reflect identity; they actively produce it (Lake 530). I Love Dick and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas each lean into this dynamic, using gendered literary tropes to deconstruct the masculine myth of the solitary genius and to articulate an alternative model of feminist authorship grounded in collaboration and embodiment.
In Stein’s novel, gender roles are stylized performances rather than stable identities. Stein casts herself in the role of the masculine genius, donning corduroy suits, a straw cap, and cane, but pointedly refers to this outfit as a “costume” (126). Her use of the French term for suit, “costume,” underscores its self-conscious artifice, marking masculinity not as an essence she inhabits but as a role she puts on. She plays the part of the male author, writing “all alone with English and [herself]” (77), echoing the modernist fantasy of isolated masculine brilliance (Doyle 57). And yet, Stein’s co-authorship constantly undermines this performance: the reader learns that Toklas types Stein’s work, participates in her writing process, and accompanies her everywhere. The myth of solitary genius collapses into an act of domestic collaboration.
Stein reinforces gender codes only to subvert them from within. She uses male pronouns when discussing “the artist”—“no artist needs criticism, he only needs appreciation” (256)—suggesting that in her cultural moment, the genius artist was necessarily male. But she does not try to pass as a man. Instead, she portrays masculinity as an outfit that she can wear and discard. Meanwhile, Toklas is aligned with femininity and domesticity: she describes art using cooking metaphors (45), and even recreates Picasso’s drawings in embroidery (200). These acts insert the domestic into the sphere of modernist art, elevating feminine labor as a form of artistic production. Stein’s performance of gender is thus both a critique of male artistic mythology and an ironic elevation of the very roles used to exclude women.
Kraus, by contrast, is more confrontational and overt in her treatment of gendered roles. She names and performs cultural tropes to deconstruct the literary structures that bar her. Early in I Love Dick, she identifies how the hetero-male novel places the male author as subject and reduces others—especially women—to types: “bitches, libellers, pornographers” (72). Kraus pokes fun at this conceit by placing Dick, the male, as subject, only to characterize him as “The Cowboy” and finally relegate him to the world of tropes, recentering the “I” as subject. Tropes become a tool of resistance. By naming and exaggerating the tropes that women artists are often reduced to—“The Serious Young Woman” (178), “Crazed Kike Witches of New York” (196), “money-hustling hag” (28)—Kraus exposes their limitations and attempts to write her way out of them. By calling herself “The Dumb Cunt” (27), Kraus satirizes the label ascribed to women who dare to speak too much, desire too loudly, or write outside the accepted forms. Her project, she declares, is a fragmented feminine narrative: “The Dumb Cunt’s Tale.”
What begins as “reproductive mimesis”—mimicking the tropes imposed on women—evolves into “productive mimesis,” as Kraus reworks those roles to assert her own authority (Fournier, “Performing Phallic Mimesis as Parody” 25). Ironically, Sylvère defends Dick early in the novel: “We’ve been treating Dick like a dumb cunt. Why should he like it? By not calling he’s playing right into his role.” (59). This moment provides a meta-commentary on the structure of the book. Sylvère’s comment that they are treating Dick “like a dumb cunt” delineates how the novel inverts traditional gendered power: now the man is romanticized, ignored, overwritten, and made into a trope. Dick’s silence, far from preserving his authority, confirms his role as the object of projection, as Kraus scripts him into passive unreadability and he plays “right into his role.” He becomes a stand-in for the “residual traces of patriarchal masculinity” (Fournier, “Performing Phallic Mimesis as Parody” 34). Kraus repeatedly uses the language of performance—“playing The Academic Wife” (145), “playing right into his role” (59)—to signal that these tropes are theatrical, not essential. The figure of “The Cowboy” mocks how male aloofness is mistaken for depth, while female expression is dismissed as hysteria. In scripting Dick into her narrative, Kraus reclaims the authority to define roles, not simply to inhabit them.
Significantly, both authors also use labels and names to carve alternative paths for themselves outside of gendered expectations and binaries. In I Love Dick, Kraus repeatedly invokes the provocative label “Kike” to describe both herself and Sylvère, as well as other Jewish artists. It becomes the only category in the novel that is not gendered, functioning instead as a marker of cultural marginality and outsider status: “You were the greatest Cowboy. And Sylvère and me, with our two-bit artworld hustles, projects, conversation skills—well, we were Kikes.” (146). Here, “Cowboy” stands in for masculine autonomy and mythic authority, while “Kike” becomes a counter-category, one that offers the possibility of artistry and authorship as non-gendered identities. By embracing this term, Kraus resists victimhood and reclaims agency through marginality, positioning herself as an artist and writer before anything else.
In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein illustrates gender binaries in the naming conventions of her cast. Male artists are referred to by their last names (Picasso, Matisse, Braque), affirming their status as singular, serious figures. Women, by contrast, are identified by their first names (Fernande, Alice, Marcelle) or in relation to their husbands (Madame Matisse, Mrs. Sherwood Anderson). But notably, Stein herself is always referred to by her full name, “Gertrude Stein,” a gesture of self-styling that asserts her presence as both subject and author. The only other figure in the book afforded this treatment is a woman whom “everybody called Marie Laurencin” (66). Laurencin, like Stein, was a significant female artist operating in male-dominated circles. By bestowing these two women with full names, Stein symbolically elevates them into a space of authorship typically reserved for men without shedding their femininity. Full naming becomes a kind of linguistic transcendence, offering entry into a creative space that resists binary categories.
Stein and Kraus manipulate and exaggerate gendered tropes to expose the instability of identity and to undermine the patriarchal logic that binds authority to masculinity. Their writing reveals that genius, authorship, and even gender itself are not innate qualities, but constructs: “costumes” to be worn, undone, and rewritten. Rather than simply rejecting gendered identities, Kraus and Stein remix them, drawing on the tools of the literary and cultural systems they inhabit to create new categories, new personas, and new spaces of authorship. They refuse the rigid roles they are handed, but they do not abandon identity; instead, they write through it, claiming the right to name themselves, and to be named on their own terms.
Though they write from distinct historical moments, both Stein and Kraus dismantle the gendered foundations of autobiography by rejecting the fantasy of a unified, sincere “I.” Their works insist that female subjectivity in life-writing is not recovered through confession or transparency, but through rupture: through vicarious voice, genre contamination, and exaggerated gender performance. By exposing the autobiographical pact’s masculinist origins, Stein and Kraus reveal autobiography as an institutional site of exclusion rather than a neutral form of self-expression. Their interventions do not seek recognition within autobiography’s existing rules. Instead, they destabilise the conditions under which such recognition is conferred. By refusing sincerity as a moral demand and coherence as a prerequisite for legitimacy, both authors transform life-writing into a relational, performative practice that resists patriarchal norms of authorship. Read together, Stein and Kraus present the autobiography as a method of sabotage, one that insists that women not only inherit the conditions of authorship but continually remake them.
Works Cited
Anderson, Linda R. Autobiography. 2nd ed, Routledge, 2011.
Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight : Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. 10th anniversary ed, University of California Press, 1993.
Doyle, Nora. “Gertrude Stein and the Domestication of Genius in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.” Feminist Studies, vol. 44, no. 1, 2018, pp. 43–69.
Fournier, Lauren. Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism. The MIT Press, 2021.
Fournier, Lauren. “From Philosopher’s Wife to Feminist Autotheorist: Performing Phallic Mimesis as Parody in Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick.” ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 45, no. 4, 2019, pp. 23–52.
Junker, Carsten. “Vicarious Writing, Or: Going to Write It for You.” Amerikastudien / American Studies, vol. 65, no. 3, 2020, pp. 325–45.
Lake, Tom. “‘Honesty of That Order Threatens Order’: The Autofiction of Chris Kraus, Annie Ernaux, and Sophie Calle.” Life Writing, vol. 21, no. 3, 2024, pp. 519–33.
Sykes, Rachel. “‘Who Gets to Speak and Why?’ Oversharing in Contemporary North American Women’s Writing.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 43, no. 1, 2017, pp. 151–74.
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